This American Life's obituary for Dennis Ritchie | Hacker News Reader

This American Life's obituary for Dennis Ritchie

nytimes.com

48 pointstimr10 comments

Just a note that this is from "These American Lives" a special section in the New York Times edited by Ira Glass and his team from "This American Life", the radio show.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/22/magazine/the-l...

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

As a big dmr fan, I'm happy his death was noticed in at least some small part by the non-geek media. I didn't love this obit though, mostly because (while Google is far from perfect) I think the swipe that equates them with Apple in terms of mobile device control weakens the piece.

Contrary to what the article says, vendors are free to make handsets that run Android without any Google approval, they just don't get all the userland Google apps stuff. Also, Google is hardly in the same league of gatekeeping that Apple is when it comes to their app store, both because they lean towards easy approval of anything not harmful, and because in the standard OS distribution you're free to install your own APKs, other competing app stores (eg. Amazon), etc. Equating that situation to Apple's App Store where that's all you get unless you're going to jailbreak the phone is so much of a simplification of the truth that it is basically a lie.

While I agree that equating the two in the article was extremely sloppy, there also exists the phenomenon of Google providing open tools to device makers and carriers, who then use it to create a locked device with poor privacy standards. The Android stack itself may be open, but the devices that actually end up in users' hands vary wildly in their respect for consumer freedom.

The author of this piece, Ellen Ullman, wrote a really great book (IMHO) called "Close to the Machine" back in 1997; I'm not sure, but I think some of the book was based on a series of (very early) Salon.com essays. Besides being a thoroughly enjoyable nostalgia trip back to the original dotcom bubble, it is a very insightful and enjoyable exploration of what it feels like to program a computer, and why it can be such a rush. Highly recommended, especially for anybody who finds themselves struggling to explain what it's all about to a non-technical person.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780872863323-6

She also wrote a novel called "The Bug", which is about a team of software developers trying to track down an elusive bug which likes to manifest itself during demos to VCs. It's a bit dated since it takes place in the mid-1980s, but those of us who have lived through that technology might find it interesting. (Apparently, there's still some interest in this book, since I see that a paperback edition is going to be released at the end of February.)

technically, I don't think it's correct to say that C let you bring down the system with one command.

On a protected memory system, I think the worst you could do was a core dump. On Unix, unless you were root, you couldn't hose the system. And if you were root, you didn't need C to do it.

On a DOS, Windows 3.1, Mac machine, yeah, an overrun could freeze your whole system, or just make things go haywire at an unexpected time. Ah... the Mac bomb dialog...fun times. Not remembering exactly what Windows 3.1 did, I don't think the BSOD had been invented yet.

    while (fork());

will cause a world of hurt on a multi-user Unix, even non-root.

not if you have sane ulimits on processes, like any multiuser machines should

I did this once, just to see what would happen. (I hadn't read Lion's notes yet).

The admin came running (well, fast-walking) and asked me if I knew what I was doing.

"Now I do," I replied.

"No, you don't," he said. The next morning there was a photocopy of Lion's Notes on V6 Unix on my desk.

I learned a lot from that guy, and that illicit copy of LN.

I'm surprised the bundling of open android OS with the closed ios and windows phone OSs got passed fact checking. I'm also surprised that someone who claims to be technical would make that mistake.

Either way the author, intentionally or otherwise, misinforms her readers about Android in this article.

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